Momodora: Reverie Under The Moonlight

I generally enjoyed my time with this charming little metroidvania. It seems to me as if Ender Lilies might have taken some degree of its setting/tone from this one. The art style is simple but satisfying, as is the story, insofar as it can even be called a story - an undead curse emanates from a city so a priestess sets out to vanquish it! It's never really elaborated too much more than that. And the characters are similarly simple and receive no development. But that's fine. Many people play short metroidvanias primarily for the mechanics anyway; although as described below, there's plenty of issues with the mechanics as well. For the most part I think I appreciated the tone, which was equal parts whimsy and grim-dark. The game doesn't overstay its welcome; I imagine I would've tuned out any more than 10 hours of this. The one thing I think this game does best mechanically is its exploration. I was usually quite highly motivated to just wander around and experience what the world had in store for me. Enemy design isn't tremendous, and boss design is probably, if anything, even worse. There's basically just two enemy types, melee and ranged - there's not a heck of a lot of variation within those categories. And even if we allow for specific instantiations of each of the two broad classes, there's maybe upwards of 10 different enemies in the ENTIRE game. Combat is almost entirely a matter of positioning and timing, and it requires some degree of analysis and then puzzling out of the optimal route - most scenes do have an optimal route in terms of action profiles over time. I imagine this was somewhat due to the constraints of a single developer, and so the actions of each enemy tend to be very blunt and stereotyped. The player character herself has a melee attack and a ranged attack. In most instances the ranged attack is unambiguously superior from a utility perspective as it allows you to deal basically the same DPS but remain much less engaged with the actual mechanics of the enemy in question. I'd say this was probably a bad move, as staying at a ranged and spamming your arrows infinitely is usually the dominant strategy, hence allowing the player to participate in the mechanics as little as possible. Again, I think this may have been deliberate actually, as a response to the developer's own constraints - he may have known that the mechanics were so clunky that to require every player to engage with them may have been prohibitively frustrating. NPCs are poorly responsive. Many will have only a single set of dialogues they repeat for the entire game. Others will respond to a single event and then begin repeating a different set of dialogues for the remainder of the game. No NPCs dynamically change and respond continuously. Hazards are excessively punishing. Remember how a reasonable contingent of players lost their minds when Silksong had 2 damage hazards on release? In this game, even at full health, falling onto spikes instantly outright kills you. Combined with the death mechanic described below, and especially at the beginning of the game when you're getting your bearings, this comes off as ludicrously harsh, and as if the developer is actively discouraging you from continuing. Hell, I bounced off this game at least once after trying to get into it for 30 or 40 minutes the first time. The death mechanic is horribly outdated. When you die, your save file is rewound to the last time you saved at a checkpoint. This is a very different thing from simply returning the player to their last checkpoint, as happens in Hollow Knight, Will of the Wisps, Nine Sols, MIO, etc., and most other modern metroidvanias, wherein any currency you collected, any NPCs you talked to, any items you collected, any world elements you interacted with are saved. If you collected 350 currency after your last save and then die, all that currency is automatically and irretrievably lost; and if you collected two pickups after last save, those are gone and you'll need to collect them again. Like I said, I bounced off this game once, here check out my notes: "Oh that ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ sucks. When I died I lost ALL MY PROGRESS. This game isn't an auto saver. Checkpoints are save points. This saving mechanic is so f****** ret*rded. Losing spatial position on death is one thing; losing everything you've done since last save is another. " "Yep, losing all your progress upon death is a flat out poor choice. Send the player back to the checkpoint but don't rewind time on them. Now I have to fight that big red guy for 30 hits worth of damage again. So f****** dumb." "These witch things throw fast projectiles from off screen. It sucks. Stupid enemy design. Just lost all my f****** progress again. 50 currency" Here's me discovering that spikes one shot you: "Oh my god, THE SAME THING JUST HAPPENED. I had near full health and I died one shot from falling on spikes right after entering the screen from the left. SO F****** STUPID." At least the first two bosses are basically just damnage sponges with rare high damage attacks used every 5-10 seconds that deal 70+% of your health. So I was just standing in front of it spamming my melee (I avoided trivialising with ranged for the most part), waiting for it to do somthing interesting, but if you mess it up you can almost instantaneously lose. There's a lady in the monastery who charges you 15 currency for "Salvation", lol, which may have inspired the similar confessional mechanic in Silksong. Much of the art design and sound design is pretty coherent and compelling. I really enjoyed first entering into most of the zones for the first time. Each felt distinct and exciting. The PCs skillset barely develops, and for this reason it's arguably a bit of a stretch to even call the game a metroidvania. The only real brand new skill that is acquired is the air-dash, the PC beginning with double jump and a dodge roll; along with one other later game skill I won't spoil. When I first collected a Crest Fragment I thought I had got just another Health Fragment, as they look near identical. Some of this game's feedback is very weak. The two fragments are very different functionally but look almost identical and trigger identical popup windows. Would be very easy to miss that it was something different from just more health. The double jump is another game element that has no feedback - when you press jump a second time in midair you simply gain more altitude, but no particles, no unique animation, no sound effect. There's never any explanation as to why the Crest Fragments are where they are, or why they are needed to enter the Castle. Like I said, the world and the story is superficial and paper thin, poorly elaborated, and poorly cohesive. The fiction here is a little but the thinnest possible wrapper for the mechanics; the developer doesn't seem to take his own world very seriously. Many of the bosses don't allow Time To Kill (TTK) to scale with skill, as they feature arbitrary time gates, e.g., no matter how skilled/experienced you are you're going to be made to wait arbitrary periods of time for set cycles/events to occur: "XXXXXX is an ATROCIOUS BOSS> **==Her cues don't give you ANY time to avoid the attack==** if you're already in melee. You have to range it or joust in and out in discrete hits. WHICH IS THE SAME F****** ISSUES MOST BOSSES HAVE, **==where TTK does not scale with skill==** - there are arbitrary time-dependent constraints applied that require you to waste your time." "Beat ********, which was the worst boss yet And when I get the Crest Fragment she's guarding (again, why is it here? I doubt there is lore to explain it), the popup is sic: "You found a Crest Fragment!" "Its essence grants you the ability to a new bow charge level!" Did an 8 year old write this?"